“That’s What It Felt Like, ‘You’re Pathetic’”: Creaky voice, Affective Stance, and Authentication in the Speech of Lady Gaga
Keywords:
style shifting, intraspeaker variation, sociophonetics, indexicality, US English
Abstract
This paper contributes to research on the social meaning of creaky voice in American English by offering an intraspeaker analysis of the speech of Lady Gaga, an American pop star. While pop stars have anecdotally been said to employ creaky voice extensively (Jaslow 2011), few linguists have examined the extent of their use, or what they may be using it to achieve. This study, combining statistics, discourse analysis, and media studies, argues that creaky voice has a core indexical meaning linked to “low emotional energy”, and Lady Gaga draws on this meaning to portray herself as “serious” and “downtrodden”.
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Yuasa, Ikuko Patricia. 2010. Creaky voice: A new feminine voice quality for young urban-oriented upwardly mobile American women? American Speech 85(3):315–337. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00031283-2010-018
Zimman, Lal. 2015. Creak as disengagement: Gender, affect, and the iconization of voice quality. Talk given at NWAV 44.
Becker, Kara, Lal Zimman, and Sameer ud Dowla Khan. 2015. Abstract submitted to NWAV 44.
Bednarek, Monika. 2008. Emotion Talk Across Corpora. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Boersma, Paul, and David Weenink. 2015. Praat: Doing phonetics by computer [Computer program, Version 6.0.05]. Accessed 8 November 2015, http://www.praat.org/
Bucholtz, Mary, and Kira Hall. 2005. Identity and interaction: A sociocultural linguistics approach. Discourse Studies 7(4-5):585–614. http://doi.org/10.1177/1461445605054407
Du Bois, John. 2007. The stance triangle. In Stancetaking in Discourse: Subjectivity, Evaluation, Interaction, ed. R. Engelbretson, 139–182. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.164.07du
Dilling-Hansen, Lise. 2015. Affective fan experiences of Lady Gaga. Transformative Works and Cultures 20. http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2015.0662
Eckert, Penelope. 2008. Variation and the indexical field. Journal of Sociolinguistics 12(4):453–476. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9841.2008.00374.x
Eckert, Penelope. 2012. Three waves of variation study: The emergence of meaning in the study of sociolinguistic variation. Annual Review of Anthropology 41(1):87–100. http://dx.doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-092611-145828
Henton, Caroline, and Anthony Bladon. 1988. Creak as a sociophonetic marker. In Language, Speech, and Mind: Studies in Honour of Victoria A. Fromkin, ed. L. M. Hyman and C.N. Li, 3–29. London: Routledge.
Jaslow, Ryan. 2011. Are “creaking” pop stars changing how young women speak? [Article in CBS News]. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/are-creaking-pop-stars-changing-how-young-women-speak/
Keating, Patricia, Marc Garellek, and Jody Kreiman. 2015. Acoustic properties of different kinds of creaky voice. In The Scottish Consortium for ICPhS 2015, Proceedings of the 18th International Congress on Phonetic Sciences. Glasgow, UK: The University of Glasgow. https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/icphsproceedings/ICPhS2015/Papers/ICPHS0821.pdf
Kiesling, Scott. 2004. Dude. American Speech 79(3):281–305. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00031283-79-3-281
Kiesling, Scott. 2011. Affect, alignment and investment in the analysis of stancetaking. Paper presented at iMean Conference, 15 April 2011. The University of West England, UK. http://www.academia.edu/1037087/Stance_in_context_Affect_alignment_and_investment_in_the_analysis_of_stancetaking
Labov, William. 1966. The Social Stratification of English in New York City. Washington, D.C.: Center of Applied Linguistics.
Lee, Sinae. 2015. Creaky voice as a phonational device marking parenthetical segments in talk. Journal of Sociolinguistics 19(3):275–302. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/josl.12123
Leftkowitz, Dan, and Mark Sicoli. 2007. Creaky voice: Constructions of gender and authority in American English conversation. Presentation at the American Anthropological Association Meetings. November 29.
Levon, Erez. 2015. Conflicted selves: Language, sexuality, and religion in Israel. In Language, Sexuality and Power: Studies in Intersectional Sociolinguistics, ed. E. Levon and R. Mendes, 215–239. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190210366.003.0011
Mendoza-Denton, Norma. 2011. The semiotic hitchhiker's guide to creaky voice: Circulation and gendered hardcore persona in a Chicana/o gang persona. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 21(2):261–280. http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1395.2011.01110.x
Moore, Emma, and Robert Podesva. 2009. Style, indexicality, and the social meaning of tag questions. Language in Society 38(4):447–485. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0047404509990224
Pennock-Speck, Barry. 2005. The changing voice of women. In Actas del XXVIII Congreso Interacional de AEDEAN, ed. J. Leonardo, J. Perez, M. Rubio, C. Cuenca, B. Pennock-Speck, and M. Aguilar, 407–415. Valencia: Department de Filologia Anglesa i Alemanya, Univ. de Valencia.
Podesva, Robert J. 2008. Three sources of stylistic meaning. Texas Linguistic Forum (Proceedings of the Symposium About Language and Society, Austin 15), 51:134–143.
Podesva, Robert J. 2011. The California vowel shift and gay identity. American Speech 86(1): 32–51. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00031283-1277501.
Podesva, Robert J. 2013. Gender and the social meaning of non-modal phonation types. Paper presented at the 37th annual meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 12–13 February, University of California, Berkeley.
R Core Team. 2015. R: A language for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. ISBN 3-900051-07-0. http://www.R-project.org/
Rouchota, Villy. 1998. Procedural meaning and parenthetical discourse markers. In Discourse Markers: Description and Theory, ed. H. Jucker and Y. Ziv, 97–126. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/pbns.57.07rou
Silverstein, Michael. 2003. Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life. Language & Communication 23(3-4):193–229. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0271-5309(03)00013-2
Stuart-Smith. 1999. Voice quality in Glaswegian. In Proceedings of the XIVth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, San Francisco, ed. J. J. Ohala, 2553–2556. University of California: Berkeley.
Vuolo, Mike. 2013. Do you creak? [Lexicon Valley Podcast, episode 24: Get your creak on]. http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2013/01/lexicon_valley_on_creaky_voice_or_vocal_fry_in_young_american_women.html
Yuasa, Ikuko Patricia. 2010. Creaky voice: A new feminine voice quality for young urban-oriented upwardly mobile American women? American Speech 85(3):315–337. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00031283-2010-018
Zimman, Lal. 2015. Creak as disengagement: Gender, affect, and the iconization of voice quality. Talk given at NWAV 44.
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01-Jun-2017
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